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Comment by bragr | Hacker News Reader

We sort kids into the smart and non-smart labels when they are young, and those labels tend to stick, even when what we're measuring isn't raw intelligence but just variance in childhood development that wash out in the long term. I don't think either group is well served by this.

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A smart kid can be anything from not eating rocks anymore to multiplying numbers at an early age.

Most of us turn out like the rescued exotic bird which turns out to be a seagull covered in curry.

Sometimes I wish there was a Hacker News comment hall of fame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

but you can also favorite comments for your own hall of fame, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=andybak&comments=t

Never been easier to make one.

No we don't. Public schools are incentivized not to help high performers. It actually hurts their metrics and budget. The widespread gifted/talented experience in public school ended in the late 90s.

The actual intelligence segregation is self-selected. PMC parents live together in the same neighborhoods. Whether you believe in genetic or social factors, the smart kids come from here.

In the 80s and 90s there was an educational culture that believed in finding overlooked geniuses regardless of where they are from. That narrative is completely dead. All institutions expect kids to come prepared with a resume from their youth, and have few avenues for identifying talent that doesn't meet their mold.

> No we don't. Public schools are incentivized not to help high performers

This is actually true.. in my country we used to have 3 different tiers for Mathematics like 416, 426, 436, etc for high school students. You would get the right class for how good you were.

They dropped this and made a simple "sciences" vs "humanity" path. Then they also removed percentage grades and replaced with alphabets A, B, C, etc. There used to special awards for high performers with medals and gifts and the end of year, those events also got the shaft.

The idea was to reduce stress on students..

I have a 1st grader. The public school did tag testing in kindergarten and then the children in the program have a special class on Mondays for the more challenging work. Is this not talented and gifted? They call it TAG.

Check out NYC school district. Has high schools where entrance is 100% based on a single entrance exam score.

De Blasio tried to phase out G&T, and Mamdani has advocated for the same. There is an ideological push that views these accelerated tracks as fundamentally inequitable.

Yeah that sucks, as far as I found NYC is unique in having this truly merit based top end to their system (would love to hear of others if they exist). We have a tentative plan to move there if my kids need it.

Most other places water it down with lotteries, preference based on class or race, etc.

NYC is big enough that they can do what they do, which is have the very top end pure merit, then a tier lower that pulls people up from underrepresented groups. Best of both worlds. One of the top tier high school has numerous Nobel prize winners in the sciences. It's good for humanity to have these places.

Seattle Public Schools currently still has a “Highly Capable Cohort” program, though it is phasing it out.

Seattle public schools is a district of and for PMC. I'm sure you find all kinds of advanced programs in SCV too. There is an incentive to appease local parents by providing services they want to enroll their kids in.

In areas where parents aren't demanding advanced classes, there is no program for the government to identify and separate top performers from the general student population.

I don't know where you're getting that from. The sorting of students into "gifted" and "non-gifted" categories is very common. You don't need to look further than your local school district for proof.

> don't need to look further than your local school district for proof.

Yeah mine didn't have it. And the teachers fought every attempt to do so because it hurt their metrics (who gets stuck with the lower class average).

Are you by chance part of the PMC and your local school district is of similar demographics?

You can just say “upper middle class”, PMC means ‘private military contractor.’

I don't believe you at all.

What's PMC?

Professional managerial class. There are a lot of alternative descriptors with overlapping meaning that you could choose.

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